Taxonomy term

april 2014

In 2008, when dangerously high levels of methane were found in drinking water wells in Dimock, Pa., fingers were pointed at nearby hydraulic fracturing operations as the source of the contamination. Six years later, the debate still rages over whether the town’s methane problem was exacerbated by drilling operations or if it was there all along. Now a new study is adding some much-needed baseline data for methane levels in groundwater in the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale region of New York. The results suggest that, in some cases, methane occurs at naturally high levels in groundwater, without the influence of gas exploration and production.

Conceived in the 1960s to provide precise time and position for the U.S. military, GPS was soon embraced by geodesists and earth scientists. Today, it is an essential tool for geoscience research that extends far below — and above — Earth's surface.

Like the GPS navigation system in your car or smartphone, a high-precision GPS receiver uses signals from satellites to determine the distance from the receiver to the satellite. But that’s where the similarities end.

At a few select facilites around the world, engineers are able to shake full-size buildings to learn how to make them safer during earthquakes. Take a look at the massive shake tables that make it possible.

Malaria is considered a leading public health problem in Ethiopia, with almost 70 percent of the total population at risk from the deadly disease. Combining computer simulations with field data from the Ethiopian countryside, researchers are studying how hydroelectric dams affect malaria prevalence. The hope is that the new research could provide fresh insight for malarial management programs.

In March 1872, not long after William Henry Jackson’s photographs from the famed Hayden Geological Survey first introduced the U.S. populace to the rugged majesty of northwestern Wyoming, President Ulysses S. Grant designated Yellowstone as the country’s first official national park. Some 40 years earlier, however, a comparatively small plot of land in Arkansas had garnered a similar designation, albeit in different terminology, from then-President Andrew Jackson.

Of all climate and weather phenomena, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is not only one of the most well known for its impact on world climate and human life, but is also one of the most puzzling to scientists. For this reason, researchers have begun to take into account a much more global area of climate data than previously considered with the hopes of predicting El Niño or La Niña conditions sooner than is currently possible.

Wollastonite, a calcium metasilicate, has an ideal composition of 48.3 percent calcium oxide and 51.7 percent silicon dioxide, but it can also contain minor amounts of aluminum, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sodium or strontium substituting for calcium. Wollastonite occurs as prismatic crystals that break into tabular-to-acicular fragments. It is usually white but also may be gray, cream, brown, pale green, or red depending on its impurities and grain size.